Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.

This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1200 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing - especially in the year-end summaries (see links in right sidebar.)

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15 December 2011

The son of a medical professor at Berlin University, Kurt Warnekros studied in Wuerzburg and Berlin. From 1909 he worked at the Women’s Hospital at the University of Berlin, and in 1924 he became the director. In 1925 he became director of the women’s clinic in Dresden.

In addition to being a gynecologist and obstetrician, he was also a pioneer in the use of X-rays.

In 1930 following a trip to Paris, Warnekros took on Einar Wegener as a patient, and arranged a series of operation that transformed Wegener into Lili Elevenes (Elbe). This was separate from the similar operations performed at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut
für Sexualwissenschaft. This resulted in newspaper headlines.

++In February 1931, Warnekros was interviewed by Copenhagen's Dr Rank for the Ekstar Baldet newspaper. He boasted that he had performed an unprecedented operation that
the top French doctors were incapable of. There is no mention of the earlier trans women who had been operated on under the aegis of Magnus
Hirschfeld.

However Lili died during a follow-up operation later that year (this is in contrast to Hirshfeld's transsexual patients who survived).

In 1933 Warnekros joined the Nazi party. In 1936 he was accused of being a Jew-lover because of his work with the Rothschilds. However he was able to keep treating Jewish patients until 1944, partly because he also treated the wife of Nazi Party leader in Saxony. In addition he also did involuntary sterilizations. In 1944, he helped Eva Olbricht, whose husband had been involved in the Stauffenberg plot against Hitler, to escape from Dresden.

The clinic was destroyed in the February 1945 air raids and subsequent firestorm of Dresden. Warnekros remained head of the clinic until 1948, when Baroness von Goldschmidt-Rothschild invited him to live in Paris.

1 comment:

Thanks for writing this. I was curious about possible nazi connections when I heard about the time and location of some of the early surgeries. Still curious about the goals and thoughts of participants at that time.

Announcement re year-end review

At the end of each year from 2008 to 2015 I did a year-end review of trans persons and events around the world. Each year it became bigger, and it has really become too big a task for one person. I hereby give notice that I will not be doing such a year-end review this year, or in future.

I will do some bits, especially the list of new books, but not the comprehensive survey that I have previously done.

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About Zagria

I have a social science degree. I spent several years in the 70s doing Gay Lib counselling, and moved on to organizing trans groups. I was rejected by the Clarke Institute (now CAMH) in the mid 1980s, probably because I do not match either of their stereotypes, but was accepted by Russel Reid on our first meeting in late 1987, and had surgery from James Dalrymple some months later. I have mainly worked as an IT consultant. I have been with the same husband for 44 years.